Tuesday, September 02, 2008

questions

My first day back. The achilles is holding but the calf is tragically weak. The instructor was Russian, and her class evidenced that training--fast, repetitive, square. A basic strength and stamina builder. I lack both right now, but trying to reachieve them this way will be challenging.

Once the kids are back in school I think I will enjoy the walk to and from the train, the fifteen minute jump to Temple, the time to collect... right now, though, it is all about the juggle.

Thoughts on the train about the book. What kind of avant-garde practices to align? Oulipo and Trisha Brown? Danztheatre and Alice Notley? Rae Armantrout and Butoh? It is really people I am looking for, female choreographers and poets to pit against each other. I am reminded of the nerdgame where you claim characters from different comix publishers and imagine the battles. Or dinosaurs and aliens. Or anachronistic historical figures: Sarah Palin vs. Eleanor Roosevelt, for example. Wasn't there a celebrity claymation show that did this in the ring?

But, I must away to quality child time.

2 comments:

Tina said...

you know what i just thought of, your blog font is as tiny and neat as your handwriting. you found your font soulmate

Sian Griffiths said...

Celebrity Death Match! Ah, MTV. I loved the idea, but the matches themselves were always disappointing. I think, perhaps, it *is* more fun to imagine the battles than to see them unfold.

I was thinking about your book on the way to work this morning, while listening to Margeret Atwood's Blind Assassin. What I was thinking was that you found a way to write the unpalatable without being unpalatable. Your book manages to evade the problem it explores (that is, how do you make honest art about the ugliness in the world and keep an audience--something the dancers can't do in the end and Lark is martyred as a result), and I hope to God some agent notices that you've pulled this off, because I think it's pretty fucking amazing myself. That billboard haunts me. I swear I've seen it on 316, but then, maybe that's just my desire to overwrite all the JESUS with something more thought-provoking.

Enough praise.
(Take that last to be about my relentless admiration of the book or growing exhaustion with the billboards on 316.)